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Museum Monday – Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney

April 4, 2011 in art, bookstore by Kim | 1 comment

I ran did a quick tour of NYC museums last week:  the Guggenheim, the Met, the Whitney and MOMA.  What a wonderful 24 hours!  I left NYC art drunk and with sore feet.  In this occasional “Museum Monday” series, I review museum bookstores and ask if they are worth visiting independent of the museums.  I’ve previously written about the stores at the Met and MOMA, both of which warrant visiting and surpass any other museum bookstores I’ve encountered.  The stores at the Guggenheim and the Whitney, not so much.

There are two stores at the Guggenheim Museum, one at the top and one at the bottom.  I headed straight for the exhibit ‘Great Upheaval:  Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection 1910-1918,’ winding my way up the building to see it all.  This is one of my favorite periods of art, I enjoyed learning as much as I did from the audio tour and museum labels and eagerly entered the upper store hoping to find more resources.  I was disappointed.  There was the catalogue but little else that expanded on the exhibit.  In fact, all that was in this store, book-wise, was a catalogue for the current exhibits or museum guides.  I went downstairs hoping for more enlightenment in the larger entryway store.  No such luck.  In fact, I think the online resources are stellar, but not matched by the offerings in the bookstores.   The only books that looked mildly interesting were a paltry few on a shelf behind a display cabinet.  The only way to access them would be to ask the cashier to hand them to you one-by-one, hardly inviting.  Even more surprising, there were very few books about Frank Lloyd Wright.

It wouldn’t be very hard to argue that Wright’s most iconic and well-known building is the Guggenheim, yet in the store there were far more dishes and trinkets related to the building than information on the architect.  It’s not as if there aren’t scores of books on Wright, from novels to monographs to pure scholarship; there’s something for every reader.  Any book I saw felt touristy.  I was disappointed, but I may not be the norm, the store was crammed with people buying knickknacks.

Run to the Guggenheim for the art and skip the store, unless you want salt and pepper shakers shaped like the building.

The choices are better at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  In its small lobby space, the offerings are low on trinkets and focused on books about 20th and 21st century American art, the Whitney’s core collection.  After visiting the Glenn Ligon exhibit, I became a groupie but wondered how much was written about  an artist 3 years older than me.  Quite a lot apparently, in fact the Whitney had more about Ligon than the Guggenheim had about Wright.  Each exhibit has its own ‘cubby’ for the catalogue exhibit and related books.  In addition, there is a wall of monographs and two tables of books.  The sale table was busy, so much so, I had to go over to see what the feeding frenzy was about and found museum guides for $3.  Any book with decent reproductions for $3 is a steal.  While this is a nice store, under the criteria of whether I would visit regardless of the art, I’d say no.  It’s worth stopping by when you’re there to see one of the Whitney’s fascinating exhibits, but for modern art books, head another 20 blocks south to MOMA.

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Museum Monday – London’s Heavy Weights

November 15, 2010 in art, art gallery, bookstore, travel by Kim | 1 comment

Last year when we visited Italy, it was a very art heavy  vacation.  Wanting to make sure the kids would still want to go away with us, this year I kept the art light.  Having said that, there wasn’t a chance I was visiting London without going to the National Gallery.  And what better way to travel around the world in 2 hours than by visiting the British Museum?   For the National Gallery visit, we sent the kids back to the hotel in a cab and Keith and I met a guide from Context Travel who led us on a whirlwind 3 hour tour.  [This is my third experience with Context Travel and each one has been well worth the hefty price tag.]  For the British Museum, I sent the family on a scavenger hunt.  Everyone needed to find one item from each continent (Antarctica could be skipped if needed) and no one had to take a tour.  In the end, everyone was amazed by the Rosetta Stone, the Egyptian section and Elgin Marbles, without a word from me explaining their importance.  Perfect.  Here are my brief thoughts on the bookstores at each museum:

The National Gallery – The Bookshop

I found my favorite museum bookstore case:  it’s about 4 feet high and wide, has three shelves and is full of art fiction.  I’ve never seen a museum bookstore give this genre it’s own section.  The shelves contained Byatt’s Matisse Stories, Zola’s The Masterpiece, Pamuk’s The Color Red, and Rembrandt’s Whore by Matton and Black.  There were several books I hadn’t read and I’d forgotten all about Byatt’s book.

In general, this store is very similar to good museum stores in the US, not quite the Met Store, but then again, what is?  There is a wide selection of art theory, art history, technique, museum studies books.  The requisite large bookshelf dedicated to National Gallery publications.  A great kid’s section which made me long for the days when my kids loved museum stores until it occurred to me how much money I save by not buying the puzzle that is twice the normal cost because it is a famous painting.  We never did finish the Botticelli puzzle we bought last year, all that creamy skin got confusing.

The British Museum Bookstore

Tucked away in small room is the British Museum Bookstore.  It’s a space completely dedicated to and packed with books.  I’m not an anthropologist, but I’m guessing this store is an anthropologist’s dream.  The store is divided primarily by geography (Asia, India, Europe, Greece, Americas, Britain, Egypt) including all seven continents.  Not surprisingly Read the rest of this entry »

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Museum Monday – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

September 13, 2010 in art, bookstore by Kim | No comments

The underlying question for this erratic series on museum bookstores is whether or not the store is worth visiting independent of the museum.  Anyone who has ever walked into the Met’s bookstore knows there isn’t any suspense, it is the Queen of Museum Bookstores and always worthy of a special trip to visit.  The sheer size of the store would woo any art lover, it is significantly larger than most museums’ combined concession areas (bookstore, gift store, pop up stands, etc.).

Having spent the day at the Museum seeing the French paintings I read about earlier in the summer, I failed to leave enough time to explore the store.  I was proverbial kid in a candy store, everywhere I turned there were books I wanted to sample and buy. The book tables were organized geographically (this seems to be a trend in NYC, both McNally Jackson and Idlewild are similar) which was perfect for me.  I could find books about Realism, Orientalism and Impressionism, trends all were present in late 19th century French art, in one place.

Further in the store, I discovered sections devoted to each of the Museum departments, along with separate sections for reference, instructional and the usual artist monographs (here comprising a long wall of offerings).  I spent time in the criticism section and came away with two books:  The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe and Art and Culture:  Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg.  Greenberg was a proponent of abstract art and hugely influential in the emergence of 20th century American Art.  Wolfe isn’t so enamored with modern art or Greenberg, so I’m looking forward to an interesting dialogue between the books.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes enough books to keep an art lover busy for a lifetime.  These books are displayed on several dedicated shelves in the store.  I momentarily dreamed of following the example of the kids in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg, hiding in the museum and working my way methodically through the books and the holdings.  [As an aside, when my kids were younger, I read The Mixed-Up Files to them and made a list of the art mentioned in the book.  With that list, I designed my own tour for the kids at the Met.  It was the perfect way to introduce them to the collection without completely overwhelming all of us.]

My one disappointment with the store is that there isn’t a bookseller, or at least I didn’t notice anyone who could talk to me about books.  I’ve experienced this with all of the museum bookstores I’ve visited.  There are lovely cashiers, but not a resident bookseller who can guide me to the next great art history book that I would love.  In other bookstores, I can walk in and say I loved The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt (which I did), what do you recommend I read next?  I greatly miss that interaction.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 5th Avenue at 82nd Street

New York, New York  10028-0198

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Museum Monday – MoMA Design and Bookstores, New York City

July 26, 2010 in art, art gallery, bookstore by Kim | No comments

If you’re interested in modern art, your Mecca is the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  Room after room contain stunning examples of some of the best art in the last 150 years.  I spent an entire morning in the current Matisse exhibit and then all afternoon in the permanent collection.  On the way out, I stopped by the two MOMA bookstores.

My first test for a museum bookstore is what books are available to supplement the current exhibit.  For the Matisse exhibit, MoMA produced a stunning catalogue, Matisse:  Radical Invention 1913-1917. I bought the catalogue before visiting the museum, read most of it, and then brought it along with me.  This is a great approach if you love the art you are going to visit, I appreciated the paintings more than if I was just encountering them for the first time.  However, beware of the heft of catalogues, this one could throw out your back.  In the bookstore, there was a variety of Matisse related items, a few biographies, a book about his relationship (competition with?) Picasso, a small book about the MOMA permanent Matisse collection, and a collection of his writings.  It was very tempting not to pick up some of these gems, however, the catalogue was all I was willing to cart back 10 blocks to my hotel room.

The rest of the bookstores are equally as impressive.  There is one store located on the second floor mezzanine which can only be accessed with an entrance ticket, it is quieter and has a row of chairs for reading and perusing books.  The downstairs store has a wider selection.  MoMA publishes its own books that help access its permanent collection.  I bought a small book on Lichtenstein works in the permanent collection (simply called Lichtenstein) and read it over lunch.  I saw a Lichtenstein at SFMOMA, “Figures with Sunset,” that I fell in love with and was hoping to learn more about the artist at MOMA.  The book is terrific, in fact if I had more time at MoMA, I would by books on other artists in this series (Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse).  In about 40 pages, the author, Carolyn LanchnerRoy, pinpointed Lichtenstein’s place in pop art and his foundation in and reference to art history in his works.  The disappointing part was that only one Lichtenstein was on view that day.  While I understand that there is limited space, if a museum is bothering to write a book about its collection of a certain artist, it should have more than one piece on view.

In addition to shelves of books published by MoMA (a catalogue of the permanent collection, a highlights book, catalogues from past exhibits), the bookstores have masses and masses of monographs on specific artists. Given the time frame that modern art covers (1860s onward) when technology created new genres of art, the stores include significant photography and film sections, topics generally not covered well in non-modern specific stores.  In general, it Read the rest of this entry »

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Museum Monday – SFMOMA MuseumStore

July 12, 2010 in art, bookstore by Kim | 2 comments

Alexander Calder

I am an art history groupie.  The one topic that competes for my attention with writing and literature is art.  A member of a die hard Laker family (in case you weren’t aware, they won in Game 7 because (1) my daughter was banned to the other side of the house since every time she walked into the room during a game Ray Allen would shoot a 3 pointer, and (2) my husband was standing in his ‘spot’), I watched the first 5 minutes of Game 7, dashed to the Getty for a lecture by the curators of the Gerome exhibit, then dashed back for the last 6 minutes.  I love the Lakers, but a curator lecture is missed only for medical emergencies.  I combine my two passions on this blog by participating in the Art History Challenge.  I’ve considered writing about museum bookstores, they are frequently listed on Indiebound, but I wondered would anyone go to a museum just for it’s bookstore?  Well, maybe.  So, today starts an occasional and erratic series about museum bookstores.

Philip Guston

I spent a day last week with the Fisher exhibit, officially called Calder to Warhol, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Loved the exhibit (it’s going to be weird talking about the bookstore more than the art).  For the first time ever on a museum tour, a docent recommended a book, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by Musa Mayer (the artist’s daughter).  I was unfamiliar with Philip Guston and fell in love with his work.  At the end of the day, I stopped by MuseumStore to look at the book.  The bookstore has a section called “exhibit hall” which displays books and items related to the current shows.  I was impressed with the offerings for the Fisher show.  There were several books related to the artists, plus the usual catalogue and t-shirts.  I enjoyed the variety of offerings about contemporary art (there are more than a dozen), but I was deeply disappointed by the catalogue.  I’m a pushover for exhibition catalogues, but I guess I’m starting to get a little picky.  This catalogue included an introduction and and interview with the Fishers, then photographs of the artwork.  All this information is readily available on the Internet, or if it isn’t now, it soon will be soon since the collection is open to the public.  I skipped the catalogue, but I did pick up Night Studio.

Beyond “exhibit hall,” the MuseumStore has a nice selection of books:  numerous shelves of monographs, a travel section (a rarity in museum bookstores, I looked through the Read the rest of this entry »

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